$ cd /by-state-->~/devopssalary/2026/states
DevOps salary by state, 2026
51 rows, all 50 states and DC
Every wage figure in the table below is read from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) state files. Nothing on this page is typed by hand, nothing is interpolated, and where the Bureau suppressed a cell the table says so instead of filling the gap. California leads at $174,410 and Mississippi sits lowest at $95,330, a spread of 83 percent.
"DevOps engineer" is not a Standard Occupational Classification title, so the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey publishes no wage series under that name. The figures on this page come from SOC 15-1252 Software Developers, the closest published occupation. Read them as a floor and a shape for the market, not as a DevOps engineer salary survey.
evidence: O*NET OnLine's occupation keyword search returns 15-1252.00 Software Developers as the leading computing match for the job title "devops engineer" (onetonline.org/find/quick?s=devops%20engineer, checked 6 September 2026).
primary · SOC 15-1252
Software Developers
$135,980
US median, 1,687,890 employed
secondary · SOC 15-1244
Network and Computer Systems Administrators
$99,130
US median, 314,340 employed
Network and Computer Systems Administrators is the operations-side SOC that DevOps work is also coded into. It is shown alongside Software Developers so the bracket is visible rather than hidden behind a single choice. Treat the two medians as the bracket a DevOps role is measured inside, not as two competing answers.
$ sort -k2,2 -rn oews_states.tsv
Annual wages by state, both brackets
Ranked by the SOC 15-1252 median. The SOC 15-1244 column is the operations-side bracket for the same state, so you can read the floor and the ceiling of the mapping side by side. Metro lists are editorial context, not survey output.
| # | state | 15-1252 median | mean | 15-1244 median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | California | $174,410 | $186,770 | $106,440 |
| 02 | Washington | $166,540 | $171,040 | $103,910 |
| 03 | New York | $166,180 | $163,820 | $105,810 |
| 04 | Massachusetts | $165,210 | $161,730 | $110,980 |
| 05 | Oregon | $142,720 | $149,060 | $102,000 |
| 06 | New Hampshire | $139,720 | $144,530 | $100,230 |
| 07 | Maryland | $138,680 | $151,560 | $118,290 |
| 08 | Colorado | $138,390 | $150,940 | $103,370 |
| 09 | District of Columbia | $136,880 | $144,430 | $110,970 |
| 10 | Virginia | $136,460 | $146,340 | $109,610 |
| 11 | New Jersey | $135,940 | $143,800 | $116,420 |
| 12 | North Carolina | $134,710 | $136,940 | $95,230 |
| 13 | Connecticut | $134,120 | $141,260 | $105,880 |
| 14 | Delaware | $133,020 | $138,110 | $94,200 |
| 15 | Texas | $132,150 | $136,450 | $101,240 |
| 16 | Illinois | $132,110 | $136,540 | $100,080 |
| 17 | Idaho | $131,590 | $134,370 | $91,880 |
| 18 | Georgia | $131,010 | $132,150 | $97,170 |
| 19 | Florida | $130,980 | $137,010 | $95,200 |
| 20 | Rhode Island | $130,590 | $129,080 | $103,100 |
| 21 | Minnesota | $130,050 | $127,530 | $101,870 |
| 22 | Arizona | $129,690 | $132,530 | $90,280 |
| 23 | South Carolina | $129,450 | $136,240 | $92,520 |
| 24 | Nevada | $128,810 | $137,350 | $103,440 |
| 25 | Utah | $128,810 | $129,860 | $95,820 |
| 26 | Pennsylvania | $126,550 | $128,110 | $86,140 |
| 27 | Missouri | $126,120 | $123,810 | $80,870 |
| 28 | Michigan | $125,570 | $122,720 | $92,750 |
| 29 | Vermont | $125,280 | $136,100 | $86,020 |
| 30 | New Mexico | $124,520 | $126,620 | $90,790 |
| 31 | Hawaii | $124,040 | $134,600 | $101,450 |
| 32 | Maine | $123,120 | $129,040 | $83,890 |
| 33 | Wisconsin | $122,660 | $122,620 | $83,650 |
| 34 | Alabama | $122,540 | $122,840 | $81,400 |
| 35 | Tennessee | $122,430 | $120,560 | $88,100 |
| 36 | Montana | $121,990 | $133,550 | $80,950 |
| 37 | West Virginia | $121,000 | $118,410 | $74,490 |
| 38 | Oklahoma | $118,100 | $118,510 | $83,990 |
| 39 | Wyoming | $115,170 | $123,360 | $75,220 |
| 40 | Iowa | $114,890 | $118,780 | $84,500 |
| 41 | Ohio | $114,090 | $119,860 | $97,570 |
| 42 | Kansas | $113,420 | $116,560 | $83,340 |
| 43 | Nebraska | $110,900 | $115,590 | $84,700 |
| 44 | Kentucky | $109,010 | $120,730 | $87,020 |
| 45 | Indiana | $105,920 | $113,980 | $84,550 |
| 46 | North Dakota | $105,600 | $107,000 | $86,450 |
| 47 | Arkansas | $104,490 | $109,590 | $81,590 |
| 48 | Louisiana | $102,800 | $108,270 | $90,160 |
| 49 | South Dakota | $96,310 | $104,790 | $75,010 |
| 50 | Mississippi | $95,330 | $99,840 | $79,990 |
| -- | Alaska | not published | not published | $97,500 |
# abstentions (1 of 51)
Alaska reads "not published" for every SOC 15-1252 wage cell. BLS suppressed one or more estimates for this state, so those cells have no published value. BLS still publishes employment for the state (530 jobs), so the row stays in the table rather than being dropped. We do not carry a figure over from an older release, borrow the national median, or interpolate from neighbouring states.
# source
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, SOC 15-1252. Snapshot taken 6 September 2026.
BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, SOC 15-1244. Snapshot taken 6 September 2026.
Reference period May 2025. Public domain; attribute to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. Licence.
Suppression codes: * wage estimate not available; ** employment estimate not available; # wage equal to or greater than $115.00 per hour or $239,200 per year.
Abstentions: Alaska (SOC 15-1252 wage cells suppressed).
Refresh: Annual. BLS publishes each OEWS reference year about twelve months after the May reference period; the May 2026 estimates are due in spring 2027. Re-run extract-oews.py and build-site-data.mjs against the new flat files.
$ head -10 ranked.tsv && tail -10 ranked.tsv
Highest and lowest paying states
Both lists are computed from the same table above, so the page cannot disagree with itself. States with a suppressed median are excluded from the ranking rather than assigned a position.
Ranked over 50 of 51 rows. Not ranked: Alaska.
What drives state-level pay differences
The gap between California at $174,410 and Mississippi at $95,330 is driven by several compounding factors. Cost of living accounts for some of it but not all. California pays more even on an adjusted basis because of the concentration of high-revenue technology employers, competition for the same engineers, and a culture of equity compensation that pulls cash bands up with it.
States with a large government contractor presence, particularly Virginia, Maryland and Colorado, pay well for infrastructure engineers who hold security clearances. All three sit inside the top ten above, and Maryland and Virginia do it without a headline tech metro.
Remote work has started to compress the differentials. A growing share of DevOps roles are advertised as remote, and employers at the high end often pay a single national rate rather than adjusting for geography. The OEWS figures record where the job is located rather than where the employer is headquartered, so a remote engineer paid a Bay Area band from Ohio lands in the Ohio row.
One caveat worth holding on to: the 15-1252 bracket is broader than DevOps. It contains application developers and systems software engineers as well as the infrastructure and platform roles this site is about. The SOC 15-1244 column is the other end of that mapping. Read a real DevOps offer as sitting between the two columns rather than on either one.
Level, employer tier and specialisation move an individual offer far more than state does. Those layers are market-comp data (Levels.fyi, Glassdoor, Built In and Blind self-reports), not BLS, and they are broken out at /career, /companies and /specialisations.